Introduction

Hi, my name is Teoh Wei Liat and I am a 3D artist working in Malaysia. I always wanted to create a Sci-fi robot scene and I've had an idea in my mind for some time now. After I watched the Japan anime Gurren lagan, I became interested in the robot design. Therefore I chose one of my favorite characters in the anime called King Kittan.

In addition, I wished to redesign the scene and hoped to create a great environment that would make the robot look great. I spent about one week researching the character and environment online and drawing a sketch of my image.

Refrences & Concept

I tried to find some reference online for the front, side, back and perspective views of the robot. I also took some time to study the gadget and its parts (Fig.01).

Fig. 01

Afterwards, I drew some color, mood and design sketches in Photoshop. The purpose of was to let me have a clear picture of roughly what I was going to achieve in the final image. Before I started the modeling, I did a proxy modeling in Maya. All of this modeling was very low-poly and was just created to match with the concept image and check the perspective and camera angle (Fig.02).

Fig. 02

Modeling

I started by modeling King Kittan because he was going to be the main subject of my image. I used simple Maya box modeling, tweaked the face, extruded and finally beveled the hard edge. I only modeled half of him and then mirrored this to the other side. Next I decided to add some scratches to some parts because King Kittan has been in a war and so shouldn't be so perfect and clean (Fig.03).

Fig. 03

After the robot, I went back to Photoshop and tried to draw some perspective guidelines and study the composition. Because I wanted people's attention to be on King Kittan, the perspective arrows I planned were actually all pointing out from him. For a better composition, the foreground (blue arrows) guides were all perpendicular with him. I also tweaked the focal length of my camera to 20 (by default it is 35) to achieve a more dynamic perspective, as King Kittan is a giant robot in a big garage (Fig.04).